milk sickness
noun
Simple meaning
Caused by consuming milk from cattle suffering from trembles.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
milksiknuhsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈmɪlkˈsɪknəs
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Caused by consuming milk from cattle suffering from trembles
Disease of livestock and especially cattle poisoned by eating certain kinds of snakeroot
A condition, with trembling and vomiting, caused by ingestion of milk, meat, etc. from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot, which contains the poison tremetol.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: Caused by consuming milk from cattle suffering from trembles
Used this way, milk sickness is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It sounds natural in ordinary conversation and in expressive writing alike.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Everyday but emotionally strong
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.